First Opinion Podcast

In recent years, people are increasingly blaming perimenopause for a constellation of symptoms: weight gain, hair loss, brain fog. But does the evidence support this point of view? Who’s profiting from it? And what does...

In 2023, Netflix released a documentary titled “Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones,” which looked at some small, geographically isolated places around the world in which, reportedly, residents regularly lived to 100...

His real name is Will Flanary, but you probably know him as Dr. Glaucomflecken — the internet’s go-to doctor/comedian. On this episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” we talked about how he mixes humor with some of the...

One of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s refrains has focused on medical education: Doctors don’t know enough about nutrition and preventive medicine, he likes to say. He has encouraged medical schools to beef up...

Have you ever wondered how many drugs are behind the counter at your local pharmacy? According to Thomas Goetz — a journalist, entrepreneur, and host of the new podcast “Drug Story” — “there are over 3,000 drugs behind...

The deep distrust between public health and the Make America Healthy Again movement may seem impossible to heal. But the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?” is trying to do just that by facilitating conversation between...

Ahead of Monday’s NCAA men’s basketball final, much of the news coverage focused on two overlapping dynamics: 1) what bets to make and 2) how the rise of sports betting is causing damage. According to Isaac Rose-Berman...

Religion and science can often seem in opposition, at least culturally. But they don’t have to be, say Marc Siegel and Francis Collins. Siegel, who is a physician and a senior medical analyst at Fox News, has recently...

When Jason Karlawish started working with dementia patients in the late ’90s, there often wasn’t much he could offer them. “I gave them a diagnosis,” he told me on this week’s episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” but...

Celena Lozano's son Benny, who turned 5 in November, loves trains, trucks — anything that goes. He also has a rare disease, PURA syndrome. Earlier this year, when headlines announced that a child with a different rare...

As science journalist Melanie D.G. Kaplan describes in her new book, “Lab Dog,” tens of thousands of beagles are used in the U.S. for medical research, testing chemical safety, and more. In “Lab Dog,” Melanie goes on a...

In the wake of the pandemic, North Dakota, like many states, suddenly saw a splintering of opinion around vaccines. “Not only was I concerned about the decline of vaccinations, but I was even more concerned about the...

James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA, died last week at the age of 97. He was a scientific giant, but in the final two decades of his life, he falsely stated that women and Black...

On TV, CPR looks like a miracle: a few light pushes on the chest, a couple of assisted breaths, and the person sputters back to life. “CPR has been represented in the media and TV shows and all of these other places as...

Vaccine hesitancy isn’t new, Seth Berkley points out. “The first vaccine was smallpox vaccine,” he said on this week’s episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” “and right after they were first used, there were wood...